INTERNAL CAUSES OF VARIATION 181 



SECTION IV BUD VARIATION 1 



Variation is not necessarily connected with reproduction in 

 the ordinary sense of the term. One limb of a peach may pro- 

 duce nectarines. A single branch of a tree may assume the 

 weeping habit or the cut-leaved form. Not only are these wide 

 deviations between buds of the same tree well established, but 

 also all shades of differences exist, showing that one part of a 

 plant may vary independently of another, quite after the manner 

 of meristic variation among animals. 



Bailey 2 calls attention to the fact that the plant is not 

 an individual with a simple anatomy like an animal, but that 

 " its parts are virtually independent in respect to (i) propaga- 

 tion, ... (2) struggle for existence among themselves, (3) varia- 

 tion, (4) transmission of their characters by means of either 

 seeds or buds." 



Each bud, therefore, has a kind of individuality of its own. 

 All but the first are developed asexually, yet all shades of differ- 

 ences will be found among these different members of what we 

 call a plant or tree ; hence each branch or phyton is a bud 

 variety, and one which can be propagated by cuttings or by seeds 

 or by both, and in either case can doubtless be improved by 

 selection. 3 



Bailey makes the statement 4 that " the seeds of bud varieties 

 are quite as likely to reproduce the variety as the seeds of seed 

 varieties are to reproduce their parents." 5 He quotes Darwin 

 in saying that " moss roses (which are bud varieties) generally 

 reproduce themselves by seed, and the mossy character has been 

 transferred by crossing from one species to another." If this 

 be true, if bud variations are transmitted by the seed, even 

 to the slightest degree, then the changes wrought in bud vari- 

 ation must be profound, extending as they do to the constitution 

 of the germ, a fact which argues much for the ever-present 



1 Bailey, Survival of the Unlike, pp. 80-106. 



2 Ibid. p. 105. 



3 Ibid. pp. 90-92. 



4 Ibid. p. 94. 



6 Professor Bailey does not intend to say that seeds of bud varieties are certain 

 to come true, but rather that no seed exactly reproduces the parent plant. 



